Elizabeth Smith: An eye for greatness

Alan G. Artner, Tribune art criticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

No exhibition in the United States has received more praise this year than "Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective," which reacquainted viewers across the country with the work of an American original. It came together -- against all odds -- because of Elizabeth Smith, since 1999 chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

The MCA had given Bontecou her first solo museum show in 1972. She was 41 and one of the few women artists working in New York to receive recognition. She did it with sculpture that seemed indebted to no one. But within a few years she dropped out of the art scene to live in Pennsylvania and teach in Brooklyn. She continued to sculpt, yet didn't show it.

Art professionals wrote Bontecou from time to time about having an exhibition and if she replied at all, she invariably said no.

"I was tired about talking about the old stuff," she told me, "and was in the middle of making the new stuff and didn't want anybody messing around."

That was Bontecou's stance for more than 20 years. But then she got sick and didn't think she'd pull through. Just at that time, while she contemplated leaving behind a studio to be sorted out by her daughter, Smith wrote, asking to see some new work.

Smith was then a curator in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where she had mounted an exhibition of Bontecou's sculpture and drawings from the 1960s. It presumably had gained the artist's confidence, for when Smith finally visited her and saw for the first time almost 25 years of work that had never been exhibited, slowly Bontecou's resistance to showing started to melt away.

The result was a career-long survey that began with canvas-and-metal reliefs inspired by airplanes, war machines, space travel and black holes; moved through sculptures in plastic of fish and plant forms; and concluded with drawings and complex hanging pieces that have cosmological associations.

As the early work stood apart from all other art in the period, so was the late work equally individual. "Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective" was, then, the rarest kind of exhibition, one to honor an artist who had progressed according to her own timetable, working from a personal vision, beholden to no one.

The exhibition appeared to acclaim in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Earlier this month it received the "First Place Award for Best Monographic Show Nationally" from the International Association of Art Critics. Smith also was named "Woman of the Year" by the Chicago Society of Artists.

"Lost and found," said Bontecou about herself, laughing. Let us give thanks to the "finder."